Email Marketing – Cost effective solution for Small Businesses
Small businesses and those who have just started out, have a lot on their plates to direct their attentions to. Lack of resources, a thin stream of prospects owing to limited brand recognition, tight purse strings, shorthanded in workforce and competition to tackle are some of the problems that small businesses face constantly. While there are different solutions to above mentioned problems, what small businesses are looking for are cost-effective solutions and email marketing is the best fit for them.
Why Email Marketing?
Email marketing is one of the oldest marketing channels that is going strong since four decades. Be it for customer acquisition or for customer retention, marketers consider email marketing to be their first choice of communication. Additionally, an email address is required for interacting anywhere in the digital realm and not restricted to any specific location, so you interact with customers all over the world using emails.
As per a Radicati email report, worldwide email users are currently 3.8 billion in 2018 and forecasted to grow to 4.2 billion in 2022. This is an indication that those not yet implementing email marketing in their strategies are losing out on a major chunk of profits. Let’s understand how email marketing is the cost-effective solution for small businesses.
Read also:Brands email newsletter you have to subscribe
How is email marketing cost-effective?
Vast Reach
As we stated earlier, emails are not restricted by geography and all you need is the email address of the subscriber to strike a conversation with them. With ads in local newspapers and billboard, you are limited to a local audience and even in case of social media, the customer needs to be following your business in order to see your post. Even then, your post may be lost in a flood of other post. An email will remain in the inbox of the subscriber till they decide to interact with it.
Send 2000 emails for $0:
Most modern email service providers offer their services for nominal charge or virtually free for businesses with mailing list smaller than 2000 subscribers. With features such as rich email template library, DIY-email editors, email automation, list management and support for third party email templates, small businesses don’t need to break their bank to implement a basic to mid-level email marketing to delight their customers..
Scalability:
While email service providers provide features for nominal charges, it doesn’t mean you should stop considering scaling up. As your businesses expands, your email marketing game also scales accordingly. You can implement additional tools such as CRMs, third party analytics, landing page integrations or recommendation engine at a later stage to improve your email marketing campaigns and customize your interactions with your customers.
Reach correct audience
Using correct lead generation methods, you manage to get addresses of your potential customers.
With appropriate email list segmentation, you send the right message to right person, with right offer and that too at right opportune time. Interested customers revert back to your email with their requirement and this way you create correct business opportunities as soon as you hit send.
Boost sales
By building trust of your customers using email, you create an audience who waits for updates from your business as well as set an expectation of benefited from your emails. This way you can constantly innovate your email marketing strategies to boost sales throughout the year.
Instant result
The change in the customer behavior is almost instant in case of email marketing. Observe a sharp increase in the open rates but below average click rates, your subject line worked but CTA was unimpressive. The performance of an email campaign is visible within a 4hour window from the time of send. This kind of quick response is very hard to observe in other marketing channels.
Eliminates Burnout
One of the prominent reasons for failure of any small business is the fact that business owners try to fit in a lot of work in a day’s gap and with passage of time experience burnout. One of the most prominent advantage of email marketing is the ability to personalize the communication based on the customer journey with the help of merge tags and dynamic content blocks. This creates a conversation that moves ahead from addressing your customer by their first name and onto recommending products based on purchase history. Add to it the factor of automating your email campaign based on workflow conditions and you can focus on other parts of your business while your customers receive relevant emails automatically.
Highest ROI
Imagine you are sending a bi-weekly email marketing campaign to 5,000 subscribers. Your campaign has an open-rate of 25%, which means at least 1250 subscribers opened your email. Assuming, you got a poor click through rate of 2%, 25 people clicked on your campaign and going by the industry standard of only 2% of those clicking actually convert, you have one paying customer.
If the average value of conversion is $1000 and you spend $550 monthly, wherein the cost is divided between the template production, staff salary, CRM & ESP subscription and other hidden or insignificant costs, you still have a profit of $450. This way you are getting an ROI of 200% minimum even if you have below-average email performance.
Email marketing is no rocket science. While, it may consume some time to be set-up but in the longer run you can reap in large benefits / profits with most of your efforts focused on expanding your business instead of worrying about your customers. Have we missed any argument? Share your views in the comment below.
Small businesses and those who have just started out, have a lot on their plates to direct their attentions to. Lack of resources, a thin stream of prospects owing to limited brand recognition, tight purse strings, shorthanded in workforce and competition to tackle are some of the problems that small businesses face constantly. While there are different solutions to above mentioned problems, what small businesses are looking for are cost-effective solutions and email marketing is the best fit for them.
As per a Radicati email report, worldwide email users are currently 3.8 billion in 2018 and forecasted to grow to 4.2 billion in 2022. This is an indication that those not yet implementing email marketing in their strategies are losing out on a major chunk of profits. Let’s understand how email marketing is the cost-effective solution for small businesses.
